Introducing The Carpetbagger

No school today! (Six inches of snow and the entire state shuts down.) So I’ll be updating my blog like a fiend.

The New York Times online has an awesome new feature all about the award season.

It has a blog by David Carr, called the Carpetbagger as well as a column by Joyce Wadler. Every feature article from other NY Times film columnists – A.O. Scott, Sharon Waxman, Caryn James, Campbell Robertson etc. – are also there for you to browse. You can explore by clicking here.

—————–Tangled Tinsel – David Carr

The Oscar ecosystem is apparently delicate enough so that a snafu in a minor awards event can set off ripples that may have significant, or at least discernible impact. By now, most of you freaks – who else would be looking at a blog about the Academy Awards this far in advance? – know that the National Board of Review has pushed its awards announcement from yesterday to Dec. 12. The board failed to include some critical names in key categories and had to re-boot after keening from various studios. Normally, the National Board of Review’s approbation is the kind of thing movie companies cite if they win and pooh-pooh if they lose – the voting process may or may not involve chicken feathers and goat’s blood – but now that the group has lost the pole position, people flacking various pictures are wondering what impact it will have. The annual awards kabuki, described in “The Economy of Prestige,” a book by James English, points out that, “The movie prizes founded in the postwar period – those sponsored for the most part by the guilds and the film circles – have settled into an orderly system within which the eminence of the Academy Awards is always implicitly recognized.”

The Academy Awards still lie at the end of the rainbow, but the route will be altered this year. It will now fall to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association to get the whole ball rolling on Dec. 10. There are those publicists who had hoped that a nudge from NBR would have a timely impact on the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association who are filing their ballots this Friday. Now those savants in the foreign press corps – who are connoisseurs of movie company swag, if nothing else – will be on their own. (Chris Rock sent then a DVD player to warm them up as they consider his TV show for this year’s Golden Globes.)

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I think something in that column describe me pretty well…

“By now, most of you freaks – who else would be looking at a blog about the Academy Awards this far in advance?”